


grown to outlive their season

by signalbeam



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Alternate Universe - Space, Bad Science, F/F, F/M, Gen, Necromancy, Sibling Incest (past), Space Adventure, Xeno
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-17
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-20 10:43:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/886329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signalbeam/pseuds/signalbeam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Out on the human colony of Persica, Rose is an amateur necromancer with a taste for property damage. Terezi is a legislacerator with a Mysterious Past. Together they turn people into zombies and fight ghost crime! And some crime that doesn't involve any dead people at all. Spans several cities, a planet, and a space station called the Glam Clam. </p><p>Cue snazzy violin solo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Mishwalm

**Author's Note:**

> Discontinued. Unfortunately I've moved pretty far out of the Homestuck fandom, and have no plans of finishing it.

Today Rose must decide which body to take: the one in the orbital station or the one in Naranga. The one in orbit is brain-dead with a mild case of acidosis, and the doctor up there is willing to unplug the body whenever she arrives. The body in Naranga has been dead for twenty-two hours, and is in a morgue two thousand miles away from her apartment. One of her friends from the Alliance works in Naranga as a veterinarian and family physician, and fills in at the funeral home on the side. Naranga’s mostly swamp and tiny fish farms, and even smaller sprinkles of people who have chosen to live in the shallow marshes. The people live in wooden towns, hiding from the dog-sized bugs and toxic algae; but even with the foot-thick glass, the bug sprays, and the water filters, there are always bodies. 

In an ideal world, Rose would go up to the station, but she’s been out drinking too much this past month, and the last time she was on the moon, they held her in quarantine for four days on a false positive for toxic fungal spores. So it’s out to Naranga. But not, she writes in the e-mail, until tomorrow afternoon, since she’ll have to notify her boss. She sends this e-mail to her contact in Naranga dead early in the morning before sunrise, and goes back to sleep again. 

When she wakes up, her contact has sent an e-mail asking whether the procedure will leave any marks. The funeral is supposed to be open casket, and no offense! But the last body she tried to revive fell on its face and cracked its skull, right along the temple, and bled congealed black blood everywhere. It wasn’t her fault. The recently revived tend to come back in a panic. Or they’re coming back as zombies. She’s never been able to run enough tests to check. 

I’ll be sure to bring a specially padded mattress for him. I’ll put a hockey helmet on his head.

No, you can’t! her friend writes back. On Rose’s request, he delays embalming until she arrives and works her necromancy. You might break the blood vessels in his face and give him bruises. Stick with the mattress. Is your brother coming?

Like most people, he becomes faint of heart when confronted with someone prying apart someone’s chest. I guess it’s expected. He’s not a doctor. 

Neither are you. How do you stand it?

She pauses before sending the next e-mail. 

Science!

***

Ever since the troll arrived on planet by smashing her ship into the biggest railway station on the city, Rose’s commute has gone from a neat forty minutes to a distended, bloated ninety, and with three bus transfers on top of that. For the first two days after the crash, she didn’t have to go to work; alas, those halcyon days have passed. It's been two months later since the crash. It is summer and practically tropical. She sweats through the armpits of her shirt and has taken to hanging extra shirts on the back of her office door to switch into after getting to work. 

Rose works at Centauri Interstellar Import and Exports as a translator, transcriptionist, and occasional accounting savant. It’s a home-grown company, constantly short on capital, and always short on personnel. Three days a week she sorts through shipping manifests of grains, rice, fruits, gold, platinum, helium-3, live cuts of pharmaceutical plants, terrifying bugs, and huge live animals. She translates for her boss at meetings; she transcribes the meetings and writes minutes; she charms trolls working at Centauri Interstellar’s troll corporate rival, the Get Off Your Ass Exporting Business, more accurately translated as Fuck You, Go Get It Yourself, Dipshit—but she is a translator with a sense of nuance. 

Centauri Interstellar’s main building is on the southern edge of downtown, next to a coffee shop and across from a used car dealership. Inside is an office with flickering lighting, too few windows to get natural light, and an unnervingly low ceiling. Rose changes her shirt in the bathroom, then goes to her boss’ office. 

“What’s out in Naranga?” he says, rising from his desk. He has one of those chicken wire physiques that spring up in second generation colonials. Something about the water and the air makes the skin loose and shrivels the frame with strange specificity. He looks like a sick twenty instead of hale thirty-four. To make up for his lack of muscle, he walks with his shoulders pushed back and stomach thrust out, spine curved like a defective Venetian vase. 

“I can’t imagine,” she says. It’s a literal inability to imagine. There is nothing in Naranga. Last year, the mayor of Naranga banned coffee and tea because it was making the general store owner rich. God knows what the people out there use to stay awake.

“This is your fifth day off this month.” He’s counting those four days when she was on the orbital station. Rose has an ex up there who wrote her a letter of excuse saying she was having an allergic reaction and the only cure was on the station. From the sounds of it, the note hadn’t worked at all. “All right, I’ll give it to you. But only if you help us with a problem in our warehouse. We had a troll problem down there a few days ago. The security droids are still malfunctioning.” 

“So call the police,” she says, frowning. 

“There’s an issue with the supplier. We bought them second hand and it turns out they’re black market repurposed military droids, and…” 

“Very nice!” 

“You’re the only person in the office who’s authorized to use a blaster,” he says, not mentioning that she’s also one of four people in the company who can actually speak Alternian to a live troll. She feels woefully mismanaged. “We have the equipment and armor ready to go. Don’t you have a medal of honor from the leprechaun war?” 

“Yes. I won it by standing in a river of gold at the end of a rainbow in Ireland and shooting every tiny green man I saw. I prefer the official name. The War on the _Pavilion_.” The war where she spent most of her time holed up on the _Pavilion_ space station, tapping troll lines of communication, except for the last two months, when the trolls made direct attacks on the station. She fought in six battles, two against swarms of tiny green bugmen, and four against trolls who figured a human-leprechaun war was as good a time as any to nab the station for their own use. “What happened to Rajesh?” Rajesh is one of the programmers. 

“Got a job offer on Prospit. Anyway, it’ll be better to destroy the droids. Gina says we can use the insurance money to buy legal security this time.” 

“Is this really the depths to which we have sunk?” Rose says, with false wonderment. “Scamming our insurance company for funds to cover up the losses from our latest lawsuits?” 

“Lalonde, if you do it, I’ll give you the next two days off. Two days off to do—whatever it is you do. Or will do out in Naranga.” 

It’s funny hearing him talk about Naranga as though it’s another country, as though Mishwalm, back on Earth, would be anything more than a place from where people escaped to Shanghai or London or Mumbai. Naranga is to Arkansas as Mishwalm is to Maine. Since coming to Mishwalm, Rose has felt as though she’s returned to a stranger version of home. A Rainbow Falls, New York, with an orange sun, green seas, and a deep-seated belief that chickpeas are an acceptable substitute for chicken and beef. 

“So,” she says. “Where’s my gun?” 

*** 

One of the secretaries drives her out, an older woman whose father was one of Persica’s first settlers. The man died by falling into one of the toxic lakes after a rain, and her mother never recovered, et cetera—Rose has heard this story before, and makes sympathetic noises at regular intervals. 

They go to the edge of the city, out in a part of town where there’s nothing but fences and blocky buildings with silver, roll up sides, like a metal tongue. The air hums with the sounds of refrigeration, rumbles as the trucks and trains bring and carry out cargo. She’s given armor, a blaster, and is set loose in the warehouses. 

Four the next four hours, she lugs a blaster on her shoulder and shoots stuff at will. There are a total of eight malfunctioning security droids, and each one is tragically well-versed in military strategy, though short on mobility. She’s never been good with blasters. 

The last time she used one of these was a year and a half ago, when the _Pavilion_ was under siege by both the trolls and the leprechauns. She was nineteen then, hadn’t fired a gun since boot camp the year before. All adults, seventeen to thirty-five, planning on taking an off-Earth residence were required to serve the Alliance during the war. Rose’s job was supposed to be tapping troll lines of communication and deciphering codes and writing weekly reports on the current state of troll war strategy. For all the good it did her then, trapped in the lower engineering deck with thirty others. They were guarding the plasma coolants, half because trolls were known to target the coolants and flood the deck with burning plasma, half because the trolls had them pinned there. Jade was with her. Jade, you see, had done most of the shooting. 

By the time she finishes blowing up the warehouses, it’s an hour past noon. Her shoulder’s almost certainly going to be bruised in the morning, she’s probably lost half of the hearing in her right ear, and the warehouses has lost somewhere between eight and fifteen windows each—but she has her days off. 

She calls her boss, declares herself done with the day, and hops on the bus back home. She gets off the bus early to get lunch from a bar. She gets off the bus early and goes to a nearby bar for lunch. She orders a mojito and chickpea fajitas, and drinks faster than she eats. 

She’s halfway into a mockery of fajitas when a troll hops on the seat next to hers. The troll orders grub-stuffed plantains, then turns to Rose with a pointed smile. At first glance, the troll is garish. At second glance, she continues to be garish, but in a curious way. Despite the heat, she’s wearing a sleek, red leather jacket and long black jeans. Her horns are perfect orange and yellow cones. She’s wearing red glasses and carries a staff—or a cane? Even in the dark decor and dim light, Rose can feel the gravity of the troll’s interest, pulling her in. It’s the smile, how it’s an obvious invitation or a provocation—but what else is provocation but a declaration of interest?

“Another mojito,” Rose says to the bartender, keeping her eyes on the troll. “And a grub beer for the troll.” 

The troll rests her chin against her fist and says, “You’re just as nice as your mother said you’d be.” 

Rose lets herself laugh. The troll’s new to Persica. Her accent’s pure urban Imperial, clipped and sibilant, and just a touch nasal. Rose is willing to bet the troll can’t tell the difference between a mother and a doorknob. “I’m not sure I’m flattered that you tried, or worried you’re mistaking ‘mother’ for ‘pimp.’” 

“Rude. I know what mothers are!” 

“Please don’t say ‘underground breeding worms who pop out eggs.’” 

“Roxy Lalonde.” 

The new mojito sits in front of Rose, condensation already on the glass. Rose brings it up to her mouth and drinks. The troll has a perfect shark tooth smile. She leans in, elbow only an inch from Rose’s plate. “That’s all I get, Rose? I’m beginning to think your mother was a liar. She told me you’d be receptive.”

“And God knows I’d hate to disappoint her. What do you want?” 

“Your hand in eternal hatefriendship! The secrets of your necromancy swag.” 

“Alcohol. A lot of alcohol.” Rose plays with the toothpick stemmed umbrella in the mojito. “What does my mother want?” 

At this, the troll gives a harrumphing shrug. Her gesture is twice as big as it needs to be. She says everything like her lungs are stuck on ‘loud,’ and in a way that makes Rose think she’s being played. Everything, she suspects, is a performance to her, or a kind of game. She considers pushing the troll off the stool, stealing the cane, and making a break for it; but if it’s a game, what does she have to fear? 

The troll says, “Why don’t you guess? She’s your lusus.”

“Mother. I thought you knew what those were.” Is she rolling her eyes at Rose? The skin around the socket is the strange, bright color of new scars and the eyes themselves are filled up with red—but still, Rose thinks she sees movement. “I don’t play guessing games with strange trolls.” 

“Terezi Pyrope. Former legislacerator. Current freelance whatever.” She’s barely touched her beer, and her plantains rest steaming in front of her. It’s because, Rose knows, the troll sees a better, more appetizing dish in front of her. “You can call me Terezi. Can I call you Rose?” 

“I don’t think you’ve given me many options.” Terezi bumps the bottom of her cane against Rose’s shin, as though to hurry Rose up. Rose shifts her legs away, but after a moment, turns back and pushes the cane down. “So has she called me back to Earth? Requested that I return to a life of book-writing and academia? Shall I go back to publishing articles about the intricacies of troll romance novels? Frankly, the very idea of it makes my tongue fork.” 

Terezi smiles at first. But then her face draws in, like she’s holding a whip in her hands and contemplating hitting Rose with it. Like she’s running out of patience. “Those weren’t even good guesses.” 

Rose sucks the alcohol off the umbrella’s toothpick stem. She feels a hot spike of anger pierce through the pleasant haze of alcohol and curiosity. Who is this troll to say whether her guesses are good or not? Terezi knows nothing about her or her mother. How dare she interrupt her in the middle of lunch and start talking about her mother—how could her mother try to lure her back home so cheaply? Her poor brilliant, neglected progenitor, walking in a fog of drunken science and obscure baking vendettas. And she has never heard of an ex-legislacerator. She’s never heard of a legislacerator leaving troll space. No one as high up as a legislacerator would deign to come to this colony, not unless they’ve had some spectacular failure. Terezi Pyrope. Neophyte Pyrope. 

“You’re that troll who crashed on that ship,” she realizes. “The one who was chasing after that pirate.” 

This time it’s Terezi’s turn to startle. It’s a small, tiny motion, a minute stiffening of the shoulders coupled with a sudden ugly fear in the line of her mouth, but it’s enough. 

“I didn’t expect to meet the person who tripled the length of my commute,” Rose says. “Thank you for that, by the way. It’s probably what finally made me snap and blow a hole through one of my company’s offices.“

“Make your guess, Rose.” 

It makes Rose smile, to discover this weakness. Not out of mere cruelty. She’s only happy the field’s leveled at last. “She loves me very much and misses me, and wishes I were home to keep her company so she doesn’t become a cat lady?” 

“She did say that! But she told me she would rather see you ‘flourish on a faraway planet rather than suffer a life full of ennui and disenchantment.’ She says—” She takes out a folded square of paper from her pocket and licks it. “—‘Rosie, you need to, like, go seek out your future and make your own life, even if you’re working on some seriously unscientifically sound shit, wahooooo! But it’s a dangerous world for a pioneer of dopeass wizard madrigogs so, idk, here’s a troll. Lmfao. She’s a real sweetheart and I bet you two will be two peas in a bod, wonk.’” 

“Oh my God.”

“What does it mean to be ‘two peas in a bod?’” 

“I don’t know. I don’t care. I want to die.”

“Is it a sex thing?” 

“Please don’t mention my mother and sex within thirty seconds of each other.” 

There is a moment. “So? Should there be sex with you instead?” Rose looks up at Terezi, to make sure she isn’t joking. It’s not a joke. Rose rolls the possible answers she could give over in her head, and—well, she would not refuse. Surreally, Terezi says, “Your place is closer,” and hops off the stool. She’s wearing red crocs. Rose can see her socked feet safely cradled through the holes, and feels suddenly gentle. 

***

Her one saving grace in a day full of questionable decisions: Dave isn’t home when Rose comes back in. She ruins this saving grace by saying, once they’ve reached her room, “I’ve never tried kissing a troll before.” 

The alcohol’s curiously both lightening up her brain, and gripping the skin on the temples of her head with a claw. Her cheeks are warm. She yanks the curtains closed. The light struggles through the curtains, slips through the gap between the window and cloth along the bottom, along the top, at the sides. In the new darkness, she’s aware of the strange red leather Terezi wears, how it goes matte instead of retaining its bright leather sheen, how in sunlight it looks more like a shell than preserved skin. 

She’s heard rumors that troll leather is made from the blood of those who die on military campaigns. Trolls, she’s read, are not big doers of funerals. There was a scandal in Mishwalm when the humans buried the dead trolls from the crash instead of turning over the bodies to the troll authorities; but it would’ve taken them weeks to arrive, and it’s not as though Mishwalm has enough room in its morgues for two hundred bodies. When the Empire heard the bodies were in the ground, they refused to take them; they landed at the spaceport, blew a rocket into a cargo ship, and flew away. 

“But I’ve read about trolls kissing,” Rose says. 

“Yes. We are both charting new xeno territory.” Terezi lays her cane against the floor, puts her glasses on the nightstand. Like all people, trolls undergo strange transformations without their glasses. Sans shades, her coloring grows cooler, and her face goes from pointy to having the approximate dimensions of a spade. Her features are all strongly geometrical. She can’t stop herself from staring. After a few seconds, Terezi squirms on the bed. “We don’t have to go far. Or at all! We can sit here. I will draw things on your face, and you can hold my hand like we are tender, virgin grublings.” 

“Is that what you want?” Rose says. She sits on the bed. Terezi moves like a bird bending down and kisses her. 

There’s less fear than Rose expects. She runs her tongue across the row of teeth, into the cavernous mouth. She can hear the stretch and click of Terezi’s jaws, and for a brief moment, she imagines Terezi’s jaws like a guillotine, severing her tongue—nonsense, she tells herself, because she imagines Terezi to not be an asshole. 

Terezi reaches over, squeezes a breast through Rose’s shirt, and makes a delighted chittering noise, from somewhere in her thorax. “They’re full of blood! These are the best rumble spheres I’ve ever seen.” She sounds near tears with delight. No one has ever told Rose that her breasts are the best anything, though once Dave described them as ‘like, these frozen brown upside down teacups because damn girl you’re cold but perky.’ She glares at Terezi, trying to discern her meaning. Terezi flicks a nipple. “Lighten up, Rose. It was a compliment!” 

“I know that,” Rose says. She unzips Terezi’s jacket and shoves her hand up high until she reaches a swelling of the chest, perfectly smooth and rigid. She can feel the place where the plates flatten into the bone. “These aren’t even spheres,” she says, running her hand down to Terezi’s stomach, poking for an erogenous zone—something, anything. 

Apparently she’s going about this the wrong way. Terezi doesn’t react to Rose’s wandering hand except by covering Rose’s hand with one of her own, and putting pressure on Rose’s fingertips, until her nails dig into Terezi’s cool flesh. “Ugh. Whatever. More kissing. I’ll be gentle.” 

There is more kissing, but it’s hardly gentle. Terezi nips, bites, claws, and insists the same in return: tugs on the horn, nails practically gouging her skin, deep, toothy indents on her shoulders and breasts. She squirms on top of Rose like an anxious cat, never still for long. She kisses like it’s the grand prix of makeouts, rolls her hips into Rose’s pelvis like she has something to prove—she doesn’t, judging by the heavy bulge that keeps bumping against a wet spot on Rose’s skirt. 

Rose flips the skirt so it fans over her stomach and arches her back up. Terezi hesitates, then works on yanking off her pants and underwear. Rose, without any hesitation, shucks off her skirt and panties. It takes two of the worst seconds in Rose’s life for Terezi to get naked below the waist. There’s something curling between her legs, long and in constant motion. Terezi brings a hand down, and it instantly wraps around her wrist, gets between her fingers. It’s hard to tell what it looks like without better lighting. Rose has an impression of length, a single tentacle, all of her pubescent fantasies grafted onto the crotch of a troll. She swears her mouth waters. 

“Are the buckets literal?” Rose says, running her foot against Terezi’s thigh. “Literal buckets to go with your literal trouser snakes?” 

Terezi delivers a stinging slap to Rose’s foot and says, “Yes, the buckets are literal. Do you have one?” 

“I have some I use for carrying organs.” Terezi’s smile turns weird. Rose says quickly, “I was joking. How big of a bucket are you talking about? I don’t mind doing laundry. Or we could continue this in the shower.” 

They end up in the shower, Rose with her face pressed against the tiles and Terezi thrusting behind her, her bulge sliding between her labial lips, past her entrance, up against her clit. The water’s on hot. Terezi is pulling her head back with a fistful of hair. Her other hand is flat against her stomach, claws pushing into Rose’s ribs. It’s hard to breathe, in the good way. She finds herself moving to Terezi’s rhythm, finds herself pushing her ass up in the air so the broad, hot part of Terezi’s bulge goes against her clit, finds herself begging for Terezi to pull her hair harder. The heel of Terezi’s palm is now against her solar plexus, and shit, she can barely breathe, between the steam and the pressure. But she’s so fucking close. Her orgasm’s teasing her with hot, pleasurable sparks against the inside of her thighs, in her clit, fuck!—when it hits her, she slams her forehead against her hand and just manages to keep herself from screaming. 

Terezi doesn’t stop. Rose rests her cheek against the tiles, then reaches between her legs. She squeezes her thighs together, palms Terezi’s bulge, presses it tighter against her slit, and doesn’t even think about stopping. Above her, she hears what might be a kind of giddy, whiffing laugh. 

“Tired of me already?” Terezi says. It’s the first thing she’s said since she got in the shower. Fucking Terezi is a strangely silent affair, and thinly unnatural, like there should be more chatter. Terezi is demanding and has no qualms with taking what she wants. She asks first and is never overbearing, but it’s clear enough that she asks because she _likes_ asking. She likes seeing people writhing beneath her. She’s one of those people who enjoys giving people just a little more than they want, one step past what they can handle. Oh, god. She’s so turned on. When Terezi stops moving and lets go of her hair, she considers begging. 

“Not tired yet,” Rose says. She bears down on Terezi’s bulge, hoping for movement; she gets slapped on the ass, hard, in response. 

“Tsk, tsk!” Terezi says, sounding for a moment dangerously like one of Rose’s childhood tutors. She slaps Rose’s ass again, this time harder, and laughs when all Rose does is grunt. Her other hand’s still against Rose’s stomach, putting pressure on her diaphragm, like Terezi’s bent on pushing all the air out of her. Terezi puts two of her fingers against Rose’s lip and says, “Suck.” When Rose does it, she says, “Give me some tongue action! How good at you at deep throating?” She eases a third finger past Rose’s teeth, and reaches back until Rose gags. She withdraws. Her hips are moving in slow, considered thrusts. “Let me into your nook.” 

Her head drops down to look between her legs. Terezi yanks her hair, hard enough that she’s now straining to look over her shoulder. 

“It won’t hurt,” Terezi says, not quite getting it. Rose wants it to hurt, she wants to know what it’ll feel like to have a bulge shoved into her, especially by Terezi. “Any time you want to stop, just let me know.” 

“Just go,” she says. There’s a frantic moment where the bulge slides around her clit, then moves around her entrance, putting pressure and heat. Terezi cants her hips up, and it slips in, widening as it goes deeper in. It continues widening, entering—Terezi stops before it can plunge all the way in, not wanting to push her limits. She glides in and out, twisting her bulge, so it pushes at all parts inside her. 

The water’s getting colder. Rose tries to turn off the tap, but Terezi drives her palm against Rose’s hand. When Rose reaches with her other hand, that one gets trapped, too. Terezi, it seems, does not understand the neutralizing effects of cold water on bases, acids, and boners. 

There’s no support from below anymore, nothing pulling her into shape. She braces herself with her elbows, moves so her knees are against the wall, too. Just as the water passes from lukewarm to cold, Terezi yanks herself out of Rose and comes. Rose drops her hands to her clit, two fingers pushing into her cunt, and comes again. When she turns back, Terezi slumped against the opposite wall, tongue hanging out of her mouth and cheeks dark. The shower looks like a Pollock painting, teal beaded on the walls and the glass door, swirling around the drain. 

“I didn’t realize you were that high on the hemospectrum,” Rose says when she has her breath back. 

“I’m blind to colors,” she says. She pats Rose on the shoulder, and they shuffle around the shower, Terezi so she’s directly under the spray of cold water, Rose so she’s by the door. She decides to step out. “I’m blind to everything!”

“I read that you were only blinded after you crashed on the planet,” Rose says. She takes a quick look down, and grimaces. She’s teal from mid-thigh down to mid-calf. “Does this stuff come out of towels?” 

“Journalism,” she says, disgusted. “Your press releases too many details that no one should know about! No wonder humans are so gossipy.” 

“I don’t think they were details as much as it was rampant speculation.” 

“I had a friend who died in that crash,” she says, her voice swinging from annoyed to wounded, though it could be a show. Through the glass wall, Rose can see Terezi’s shadow, ominous and dark. “Whatever,” she says after a moment. “We weren’t real friends, anyway.” 

“Was your friend one of your quadrantmates?” Rose says, using a towel to pat herself dry between the legs. She can always buy a new one later. “Are you mourning someone?” 

“Let’s do the afterglow thing,” she says after a beat. “The part where neither of us talk about anything and whisper gross and illegal things into each other’s ears.” 

“Do you really want that?” The towel’s now blue-green. She runs it under the sink to see if it’ll make the color run. It does, a little. It’d probably work better if the water were warmer, but their extended shower sucked all the heat straight out. 

“Not at all,” Terezi says, blithe. After that, they both go quiet. Terezi stays in the cold water shower, and Rose wrings the wet towel to get the color out, trying with little effect. 

***

Afterwards, Rose goes to the kitchen for two glasses of water. Dave is pacing in the living room. When he sees her, he squats on the ground in his ‘I really have to pee’ stance and says, “Holy shit. You’re out at last. Jesus fucking Christ. I really gotta take a piss but first I need to know if the bathroom’s free or if you have another round of hot chick to bang through the wall. And put on some clothes. What did we say about naked nomads? C'mon, you can answer that one easy.” 

“I always have another round of banging hot chicks,” she says, washing out two cups and filling them with water from the tap. She puts in two chlorine tablets and waits for the water to clear. “Tonight I’m going to hit the bar and get another one.” 

“No,” he says. “No, no, no, I don’t want to hear it. I already heard too much. I’ve seen too much. We’re already the bad end Luke and Leia, you don’t have to make it worse.” 

“Does my nudity remind you of the forbidden passions we once partook in? We only met as adults. Who’s to say the Westermarck effect has any meaning for us?” 

“Please, please, please just tell me if the bathroom’s free.” 

Looking at Dave now, she finds it impossible to not see the similarities. Their coloring, for one, brown-skinned, hair the color of a citrus fruit rind, and eyes straight out of a box of Crayolas. Their builds are nearly identical, too: average in height, but every line sweeping up and stretching back, as though promising a final growth spurt to propel them into the sky. 

She regards him for a moment, torn between pity and her own sense of humor. “We relocated to the bedroom about five minutes ago. I’m surprised you didn’t run in then. I can’t understand why you’ve dallied so long here unless you have something to tell me. Maybe a confession of your burning desire to have a smuppet butt plug lodged in your ass while you work, tirelessly, as the ‘illest’ ship mechanic on Persica?” 

“Fuuuuckkkk,” he says, and dashes down the hall. She hears the bathroom door slam shut. 

She goes back to her room. Terezi is asleep with her head tilted back and jaw open. She’s snoring. 

Rose slips into a change of clothes and goes to sit on the couch. Dave’s back. He’s giving her a weird look. 

“So what’s with the fugly body paint in the shower?” he says. 

“Mother sent me a babysitter as a show of her support for my recent projects.” 

“It’s troll jizz isn’t it. The fuck. Go clean that up right now, didn’t your mother teach you anything about hygiene? How you’d like it if I sprayed spunk all over the toilet seat?” 

“I always assume you do that.” He has a point, though. She will clean later. “You’re home early. How was work?” 

“Ship I’m working on’s engine blew two light years away. Not gonna be here until tomorrow. How’s the troll?” 

“She’s interesting,” Rose says, meaning it. And meaning, too, that she hopes to know Terezi better: her mind, the sweeping curves of her cheeks, the sordid details of her failed, flamed out career, all of it. It will be something to see how the past, still cooling in its casket, will rise out of the silty dirt and disfigure the still-breathing face of the present—or is the past more like the thousands of tongues of the ocean licking at the shores of the present, wearing rock down into sand; then, one day, rearing up on its million legs and charging into the land, flooding and flattening, shaking the earth and kicking up wind. 

And even after it’s over, there is the mud and the sediment on your carpet, in the branches of the trees, the smell of salt and brine trapped in the gaps of your couch, dead fish splashed across your roof, their rotting bodies replacing the tiles now scattered in your garden, their iridescent scales flashing silver and green in the cruel sunlight. You will never get the smell of the ocean out, not even if you move a thousand miles inland. It will never let you forget, it will never let you go… It will be something, Rose thinks as she settles into the couch, to have a new friend.


	2. Naranga

The next morning, they board a plane from Mishwalm to Naranga. Rose hoped to ditch Terezi at the airport with the rock solid excuse of, ‘well, it’s not as though I could have bought you a ticket,’ but it turns out there is nothing to worry about. Terezi winks, grins, and whacks her way into a seat. Unsurprisingly for a troll, blindness has not diminished her talents at hitting people until they cry. 

It’s four hours from Mishwalm to Naranga. The plane is an old fifty-person passenger transport, maintained with indifferent care since the twenty-second century. The windows rattle and the walls shudder. Sometimes Rose looks up from her books to watch Terezi for any signs of fear, or perhaps imminent flashbacking. Didn’t her career and sight go up in literal flames aboard an aircraft, albeit one capable of faster than light travel? Instead, Terezi spends most of the time licking the window and telling Rose how she met her mother. Terezi was blinded in the accident; there was some kerfluffle with her bosses at the Imperial Courts; she decided to stay in Mishwalm, and found a job in the classified ads titled, ‘lookin for hot booty 4 a necro.’ 

“I don’t understand,” Rose says, squinting. She’s trying to figure out how desperate or mean-spirited you’d have to be to even think about applying to that. 

“Oh, Rose,” she says, “you have no idea how interesting your mother made you seem. You sounded so tortured and so saddened by your trailblazing talents. She showed me a picture of you, and all I could think was, ‘Wow! Sexy.’” 

She kisses Rose on the cheek with an insincerity so charming that Rose smiles instead of swatting her away. A second later, she’s annoyed again by the transparent distraction. Air travel has a way of precipitating her worst feelings from any situation. It’s sucked out the fading scraps of her delighted curiosity from the night before, and replaced it with the horrifying realization that this is going to be a _relationship_ —not in the chocolates and flowers and trying for babies on silk sheets way, but, at the very least, in a way that will definitely involve too much time together, grated nerves, and probably no fewer than two door-slamming arguments. And she knows, undoubtedly, that Terezi wants something out of her that isn’t for the inferred hotness of her holographic image. 

“Is blindness a fireable offense in troll culture?” Rose says. 

“No. Is it for humans? That’s ridiculous. Who needs eyes to decide whether to execute someone?” She bumps her forehead against a wall and sighs, with feeling. 

“Careful! You’ll chip your horn.” 

“Rose, I thought we had something, but it turns out you just want me so you can fondle my phalluses. You’re making me doubt my career choices.” 

“That’s not true. Did you know I wrote three novels when I was a teenager? One of them was called _The Crusade of the Forbidden Chalice_. Vaginal symbolism everywhere. Two days later, I cut my tongue trying to kiss a girl with braces.” 

“Hmm,” Terezi says, turning to face the window. Hundreds of miles of swamp are visible through the glass, and endless quantities of empty air. Rose can see Terezi’s face shimmering over the morning-green glass. The face is still, but the image of it is tossed about on the grass. It’s the image, and the image alone, that changes in color, in shape, in regard. 

*** 

The body isn’t ready when Rose lands. Apparently it’s still in deep freeze. 

“Sorry,” her friend says over the phone. “One of my client’s cows all got bitten by a toxic bug at butt early in the morning. And there’s going to be traffic in the city today. Big parade. I’ll try to get back before the parade starts, but you never know.” 

“Not much of a city,” Rose says, staring down the plain, wooden houses, elevated from the marsh on rusting stilts, and surrounded by glass. It’s what passes for a city here, she figures, like Hudson in New York, or one of those lonely Midwestern towns stabbing hopefully out the rows of corn, only to be blown away by a chance tornado. “What’s the occasion of the parade?” 

“Fifty-seventh anniversary of the town. The mayor’s going to ride on a dinosaur float.” 

Such is the span of human accomplishment. Achieve spaceflight, colonize new planets, fight wars with two different insect species, and every year, someone puts on a weird costume and rides down the street on a giant dinosaur balloon. 

Rose gets them separate rooms in an inn. Terezi immediately crawls into bed, shoves her face into the pillows, and tells Rose to go away; apparently she’s had a headache ever since they landed. Naranga has glass walls around the residential districts, but all around the edge of town are old-fashioned towers that fire a high frequency sonic pulse at regular intervals to keep the larger, giant-eyed bugs away. Something about this gives trolls migraines. 

Rose locks herself in her room and goes through the papers. When she gets bored of that, she tries contacting her mother. But when she tries, she gets, “’Heeeeeey this is Doc Rolal, and I’m visiting the _Aegis_ space station. I’m def not available to take your call right now ‘cause of the serious military shit I’m elbow-deep in but whatevs. Leave me a message. Hugs and kittens for Rosie and Dave!’ The voicemail you are trying to reach is full. Please try again later.” 

Very convenient, she thinks. For both her mother and her new companion. She writes an e-mail instead, even considers making a vid call. Her mother is always happy to see her, and likely has her phone set to push any vid call through automatically. No, she decides. She won’t. She has no doubt that her mother will bring up the incident with the cats, the one she kept in the jars of ethanol. The last time Rose went home, she demonstrated her necromancy skills by bringing those cats back to life; but she forgot the cats lungs were still full of ethanol, and the poor things drowned to death all over again. 

*** 

Her friend gets the body ready just before the parade starts. Rose grabs a bunch of tiny bottles from the minibar, collects Terezi, and takes the taxi. It’s a small enough city that the parade’s shut down nearly all the main roads, and the taxi driver seems to delight in the zigzags it takes to get to the funeral home. Terezi is wearing an unwieldy hat over her horns. 

“The inside,” Terezi says, gravelly, “is lined with lead.” 

“We have something on Earth. ‘Tinhats.’” 

Terezi’s mouth twists into a question. 

“Never mind,” Rose says. “I’ll tell you later.”

Her friend lets her into the funeral home, tosses her the key, and tells her to lock up and leave the key in the mailbox. Then they are left alone to work down below, in the greenish cold. 

The ridiculous hat apparently is doing its job: Terezi is her usual cheery self as she watches Rose work at the body. Core temperature is warm enough to work with, body is in okay condition. According to the medical records on file, the man was a thirty-two-year-old logger who died from blood loss after cutting off his own hand. He was something of a loner and tended to work alone. He couldn’t cry for help because he was tragically mute, though he made it almost three-quarters of a mile before expiring. The end result is a great body for Rose to tinker with, so she’s not too chuffed. 

She has a necromancy kit, with some organs, blood, a fresh onion, and a lot of thread and needles. She stitches the severed hand back onto the stump. She pours more blood into the body, then gives it a few vigorous shakes to keep it from pooling in the feet and butt. Then she starts working the spell. It’s one thing if you want to animate a mindless, drooling beast, a bit of handclapping and brain tweaking and then go, but it’s different if you want to bring the dead to life. Something about ghosts? Rose isn’t a big believer of ghosts, so she ignores that part. She instead paints circles and writes letters in morbid, spiraling patterns. 

The book Rose uses is a modified Alternian version of an old standard. There are fewer necromancers than there were in the old days; understandable, given that trolls are a mostly interstellar species. Most of them live their lives in a state of war, years spent traveling from one front to another in their quest to expand and conquer. Necromancy needs the dinosaurs beneath the dirt, the patience of death; knowing eventually all things will be given over, without having to take. Modern troll necromancers are only deployed alongside berserker units, or carry around their own corpses—a distasteful practice, even for trolls, and not a good use of resources, beside. 

But they brought necromancers for the _Pavilion_. It’s one of the charms of siege warfare: bodies everywhere, and not an incinerator or disposal in sight. Rose tinkered with magic, of course, before the _Pavilion_ , but she got her first—her only book there. Years of unsuccessful spells and coincidental rains suddenly turned on their head and dumped in her lap into this. Jade blew the guy’s head clear off and Rose shot her way to the troll’s fallen body. Her hands shook when she picked up the necromancer’s books, and didn’t stop shaking for hours. Mostly because she was sleep deprived. But she was excited, too, and still is. There is nothing like magic—or, she guesses, there is nothing like power. She figures they’re just about the same thing. 

This whole time, Terezi has been watching her with an intensity that burns like the sun, complete with the irritating, itching flaking on the back of her neck. Why should she feel this way when she knows Terezi can’t see her? But Terezi has her own ways of navigating, she knows. Terezi is a troll who will never be tripped. 

Through the slotted basement window, they can see confetti and people’s feet. Rose swears she hears fireworks, though it’s not yet dark. 

“What is it?” Rose says. “Are you bored?” 

“Yes,” Terezi says. “I was hoping for more glitter and more explosions.” 

“If you wanted to go play outside with the other kids, you only had to ask.” 

“I only want to go there if someone is being drawn and quartered by his quadrantmates. What, you mean humans throw party where everyone gets to live? Boring.” 

“The sad thing is, I can’t tell whether you’re joking or if you’re trying to get a rise out of me.” 

“Nonsense. I would never try to get a rise out of you. You will remain unleavened and untasty for the rest of your days.” 

She’s almost done writing the last bit of spell. “Do you want me to put your name on this?” Rose says, impulsive. She’s never done this with anyone before—well, there was Dave, except he passed out that one time and refused to accompany her ever after. 

Terezi’s eyes flicker, like an igniting flame. Then she says, “And have the vicious zombie corpse come shambling after me? Ha!” 

“You sure know how to make a girl feel special,” Rose says, writing her name in the spell and closing it off. She rubs her hands together, and starts the incantation segment. 

The incantation segment is a prayer: oh mighty tentacled creature from the otherworldly beyond, da-da-da-da, da-da-da-dum, improv section. Then comes the swears of loyalty and fidelity, which, like traditional marriage vows, are more about commemorating the occasion than making promises. This is the tricky part, aside from the actual writing. There’s a lot of training that goes into the improv section that Rose never received. When she began, she went all out, promising her life, her spouse, and every single future descendant she might ever produce; the revivals came back dumb and impressively brainless. Then came the attempts to be cool, the promises with conditionals and contingencies. Now she sticks with promising the usual things: the souls of her brother, her mother, herself, her favorite cat, the mayor of this town, a lackluster meringue pie. 

After the prayer is the part where she stabs herself in the finger with the needle and drips blood onto the center of man’s forehead. 

“I smell blood,” Terezi says, excited. “Have you done it yet?” She glares down her long nose at the body. 

“I have to cry on it, first,” Rose says, taking out the onion. She looks around for a decent knife, before going with a scalpel. 

She loves working beneath Terezi’s scrutiny. But she can also detect a whiff of, ‘if I were dead, I wouldn’t hire _you_ to bring me back.’ Why does Terezi care at all about the quality of Rose’s revivals? Rose can feel her eyes stinging. She keeps her eyes open wide as possible, and soon is rewarded by fat, dewy teardrops. She has to lean over the body and blink them down. She feels, for a moment, a pull of attraction, the way a spider must feel the ceiling through its silk. She shivers, breathes faster, curls her fingers into the creases of her palms. Her stomach feels like it’s disassociating from the rest of her abdomen; for a moment her eyes strain and shake, so hard the world jumps every time she tries to readjust. The muscles in her thighs and stomach twitch like she’s running a marathon. The gentle tug of ceiling-to-spider gives way to the howling pull of earth to a meteor, roping it in and calling it back. The edges of her vision fuzz out, then go black. Then everything’s green and red, and something is blinding her. 

A second later, she blinks. The thing blinding her is the surgical light hanging from the ceiling. She looks down. Below her, the body has open its eyes. 

“Oh!” she says. She tries to feel for a pulse, but her body’s still clumsy. Her hand hits the side of his nose. 

He opens his mouth, and makes a hoarse screaming sound. He lifts his arm up, the one where she’s reattached the hand at the stump. The hand flops unnaturally. Blood dots around the line of stitches, like a new bracelet. Rose puts a hand on his chest, to keep him down, and the skin squishes beneath her palm—he screams again. Her hand leaves a white palm print against his chest. 

“Hi,” she says. “Just calm down. I should really start lacing the blood with morphine. Are you conscious? Do you know who you are? You must, if you’re crying about your hand.” 

He’s crying now, and leaking blood. But the pressure of his arm against his chest makes him cry, too.

“I’m a doctor,” she tries. “I’m here to help you. Do you know your name?” She asks because she’s forgotten his. It’s on the charts somewhere. She doesn’t know where the chart is.

His crying sounds more like he’s choking. 

“Sorry,” Rose says. “I forgot you were mute. Can I get you something to write with?”

He’s trying to get off the surgical gurney, but his coordination is lacking. Rose decides to step aside and wait for him to calm down. She takes a quick look at Terezi, hoping she won’t find this—offensive. Not too offensive or inhumane. Terezi’s face is as calm as painting, still in the way that only art requires. 

“When I was a young troll on Alternia,” she says, speaking louder to compensate for the poor man’s whimpers and wails, “my sister and I once went up against a necromancer in a FLARP game.”

“Trolls have sisters?” 

“Don’t be stupid, Rose,” Terezi says. “Of course we don’t.” 

“Leprechauns don’t have siblings,” Rose says. “The exiles don’t, either. I heard that trolls were adopting some human affectations, this is the first time I’ve seen anyone mean it sincerely. I didn’t mean to digress. Go on.”

Terezi glowers a little, before saying, “My sister and I used to play games—anyway, there was a necromancer. We killed the necromancer’s partner and I had a chance to watch the necromancer try to bring him back.” 

The man falls off the table. He screams more. Outside, there is a marching band, the sound of people cheering and clapping. The light from the fireworks, coming through the windows. Rose can imagine the mayor in a pterodactyl costume, waving his arms to his constituents. 

“What happened?” 

“Something a lot like this,” Terezi says, gesturing at the man crying on the floor. The sound isn’t unlike a baby bird squawking. “You only have two choices: to bring them back as they were, or to turn them undead. It was sad. The necromancer rekilled her companion and committed suicide two days later. They must've been moirails. Afterwards I looted both their bodies and sold their horns on the black market.” 

“You’re sucking all the sexiness out of being world-weary. Are you all right?” 

“Yes, I’m all right!” Terezi says. “How long will he flop around like that?” 

“Probably until he either dies from blood loss or strokes out,” Rose admits. “They normally die again within a few days. This one looks pretty nice, though. He might make it. I’ll call the hospital if he’s still around in an hour. I wonder if there will be any papers about it in medical journals. One guy lasted a whole week.” 

Terezi wrinkles her nose. After a moment she says, “Rose, have you considered performing mercy killings?” 

“You don’t strike me as the merciful type.” 

“On the contrary! I am very merciful. I won an award for it during training, for being pitiless and kind.” 

“Doesn’t the definition of ‘mercy’ involve pity in some form?” 

“It can include the lack of it,” she says. She runs a hand along the length of her cane. Penis, Rose’s mind supplies helpfully. 

Rose looks to the man flat on the floor and makes a decision. “We should clean off the spell,” she says. “Before we send him to the hospital.” 

Terezi has both hands around her cane and a hazy expression of frustration on her face. Rose leaves her alone while she gets the rags and water. When she comes back, Terezi is prodding the man with the tip of her cane. The man jerks and groans at the touch. 

“Better off dead,” she says, disgusted. She pushes the tip of her cane against the back of the man’s head so his cheek touches the ground. 

*** 

She calls her friend to tell him that the body’s alive again. 

“Oh, great,” her friend says, sounding glum. “Well, what am I going to do with it?” 

“I don’t know,” Rose says. “It’s not really my problem now.”

“It’s exactly your problem! I’m going to have to deal with the inspector asking how I could have mistaken a living man for a dead one.” 

“Just tell him you couldn’t hear him screaming.”

“Oh, that’s funny,” her friend says—but by then Rose has hung up. 

“Let’s go to the carnival,” Rose says to Terezi. It seems like a better use of her time than her usual post-successful revival ritual, the one where she sits in her hotel room and plays drinking games with the minibar and half a liter of flat club soda until she either passes out or vomits. Congratulations, Lalonde: your only date in the last six months is with the troll companion your mother hired for you. At least Terezi isn’t her boss’ girlfriend this time. At least Terezi isn’t her brother. This alone makes her one of the most qualified people Rose has ever made out with and then fucked. “It should be okay for you, right? Now that you have your tinhat on.”

“Leadhat,” Terezi says. “And very well. Lead me to your human carnival! Take me to the brothel tent.” 

“There’s no brothel tent.”

“Then what’s the point in going?” 

“Fried food, Ferris wheels, and fireworks?” 

“But where will the debauched orgies be?” Terezi demands. “Secular carnivals suck.”

“We can find some other orgy later,” Rose says, exasperated. Terezi grins, and pats her ass. 

The carnival’s at the end of where the parade must have ended, in field behind the high school. The field still has white markings from the soccer season, and the native grass grows in stiff, scrubby patches. There are only a few rides, and most of the tents are low on stock by the time they get there. Rose ends up letting Terezi throw horse shoes viciously at a post. They buy food and drink shitty fairground beer, then work their way through the minibar Rose stashed in her purse. They play bumper cars and ride on the tilt a whirl. Rose buys three bags of cotton candy, and doesn’t get more than a mouthful of each bag. They spend the last minutes of the carnival crouched behind the Ferris wheel, making out and occasionally swigging more alcohol. Terezi, at one point, climbs up the fence and throws bottles at passersby. 

“ _Terezi_ ,” Rose hisses, acutely aware that Terezi is causing a scene, but still too drunk to understand why this is a bad thing. 

“I’m making them dance!” she shouts. She flings two more tiny bottles—one of them still full!—at the sidewalk, but comes off easy enough when Rose wraps her arms around her legs. She kisses Terezi on impulse. Alcohol on both their mouths, hot air on their skin and in the space between their noses and mouths, sweat on the side of her neck, sweat getting on Terezi’s fingers, Terezi’s fingers sliding from her head to her shoulder, to the side of her chest, this time with claws. The kisses move between them, exchanged like barters, one for one, two for two, the living for the dead. 

“I want my orgy,” Terezi says, a clear, strong tone that means _I want what was lost to me_. Not the thing itself, but the feeling of it or the thing better than having what was lost: the revenging, the hot-mouthed, ashy taste of justice.


	3. The Box

carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]

CG: HELLO?   
CG: I KNOW THAT COLONY YOU’RE ON HAS INTERSTELLAR INTERNET RECEPTION. YOU CAN’T PRETEND YOU’RE OFFLINE WHEN YOU’RE JUST INVISIBLE AND MASTURBATING TO YOUR FURRY ADVENTURES WITH NEPETA AND IGNORING ME   
CG: IF THAT’S WHAT GETS YOUR KIDBEAST PRANCING FINE, NOT LIKE I WANT TO BE INVOLVED IN YOUR BESTIALITY CYBERING. WHAT WOULD I EVEN BE, ANYWAY, THE MIGHTY CRAB? AIN’T NO FUR ON THAT ARTHROPOD   
CG: COME ON I KNOW YOU AREN’T OFFLINE. I MEAN, I THINK YOU’RE THERE. WHO KNOWS. IF YOU DIE OUT IN THAT GODFORSAKEN DUMP BECAUSE OF YOUR DUMB GUILT ISSUES—WHICH YOU ARE UNACCOUNTABLE AND BLAMELESS FOR—THAT’S YOUR OWN PROBLEM BUT AT LEAST PUT OUT AN OBITUARY   


carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]

CG: I’M SORRY, OKAY? I’M SORRY ABOUT HOW THINGS WENT DOWN THE LAST TIME WE TALKED   
CG: BUT YOU CAN’T STAY ON A HUMAN COLONY JUST SO YOU CAN STOP CARING ABOUT EXISTING AND MAKE ME FEEL BAD.   
CG: MAYBE YOU AREN’T DOING IT FOR ME. I GET THAT   
CG: LOOK, I HAVE INFORMATION   
CG: I SAW VRISKA. SHE’S NOT DEAD. WHICH MAKES YOUR WHOLE BLINDING THING EVEN MORE PATHETIC THAN IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING BUT WHO’S KEEPING COUNT, RIGHT?   
CG: SHE’S ON THE GLAM CLAM.   
CG: I’M ON THE GLAM CLAM, TOO. NOT THAT IT’S IMPORTANT OR ANYTHING BUT   
CG: I CAN HELP YOU GET THE PAPERS SORTED OUT, KEEP YOU FROM GETTING PUT ON THE AUTO-CULL LIST. YOUR BOSS IS STILL PISSED YOU LEFT   


carcinoGeneticist [CG] began trolling gallowsCalibrator [GC]

CG: WHAT DOES IT EVEN TAKE FOR YOU TO READ THESE, ARE YOU BLOCKING ME? THAT’S WHAT IT IS, ISN’T IT? WELL, ROUGH LUCK, I’M NOT GOING TO SIT HERE AND BE IGNORED. DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE LEFT?   
CG: FIRST SOLLUX INSTALLS HIMSELF INTO A SHIP, THEN GAMZEE GOES TO THE CIRCUS, THEN KANAYA BLOCKS ME BECAUSE SHE’S FINALLY GOTTEN SICK OF MY BULGE-CHAFING COMPLAINTS, THEN YOU DECIDE TO MOVE TO WHEREVER TO LIVE OUT YOUR PORNOGRAPHIC TROLL JACK KEROUAC/TROLL JOHN GRISHAM CROSSOVER NOVEL   
CG: AND AS FOR VRISKA,   
CG: SCREW VRISKA, HER MANIACAL ASS ISN’T WORTH IT. IT’S NOT WORTH JACKSHIT. I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M SAYING THIS BUT I CAN ALMOST SEE WHY YOU MISS HER. IT'S HARD. IT'S HARD HAVING AN ASSHOLE FRIEND LEAVE YOU. YOU START TO MISS THEM AND   
CG: AND I MISS YOU. I MISS YOU A LOT. DO YOU WANT TO GIVE IT ANOTHER GO? I PROMISE I WON’T PISS YOU OFF ANYMORE. UNLESS YOU WANT ME TO PISS YOU OFF. I CAN DO BLACKROM TOO   
CG: HELL IT’S NOT LIKE I WISH YOU WERE HERE OR ANYTHING. WAIT. I DO WISH THAT. OR AT LEAST I WISH YOU WEREN'T IGNORING ME. WHAT DID I EVEN DO WRONG?   
CG: HELLO? 

*** 

A letter from her friend out in Naranga, three weeks later: the week before her body had a pulmonary embolism, fell into a coma, then died. It’s her most successful revival yet. Three weeks of life with some semblance of higher brain function. He could recognize people, point to his nose, and aim cups and plates at nurses he disliked. That’s certainly something. 

Her friend disagrees. Apparently it’s disturbed him enough that he doesn’t want to give her any more bodies—as though it was better when all she brought back were drooling zombies, or creatures no one wanted alive. 

He had a name, her friend says at the very end of the letter. Rose reads the whole thing twice, then deletes it from her inbox. 

*** 

He had a name. As though that matters!

It’s Sunday. There’s a body waiting for them in a hospital out in the suburbs, a woman whose name Rose is not going to learn out of pointed spite. The body is out of deep freeze and currently hanging out at room temperature. Rose is on her way to Terezi’s apartment to pick her up. 

Terezi lives out in the troll quarters of town, an area of about two and a half blocks that contain about eighty percent of Persica’s total troll population. Her apartment, all seven hundred square feet of it, is up on the third floor, above a troll check casher and a troll grub bakery. The staircase leading up to the apartment is narrow, dark, and smells like burning hair and old blood—never mind the sometimes real blood seeping through the floorboards from the fights the other troll residents get into, or that sometimes the troll bakers forget to cook everything and end up leaving grubs out to rot in the alleys. 

She’s saved the trouble of making the full trip when she finds Terezi and smaller troll yelling at each other on the landing of the second floor. The other troll speaks clear, standard Alternian, with a flair for vibrations that seem to resonate with his shouts. Everything he says seems to be said with a permanent bolding. His eyes are red, and his horns are small. 

“—never should have thought I’d have a chance with you after you had hatesex with my moirail. What could I have even _done_ without getting shoved into the gray with both of you? Wait! I could stand there knee-deep in my own illegal jagoff, with more dripping down my legs like my bulge is a spigot set to full spurt! So, fine, so you don’t want me anymore! I can accept that. I’m the only troll in the whole empire who’ll ever get visits from drones to make sure I’m throwing out my slush instead of keeping it to fill the incestuous kiddy pool, and everyone wants a chance at having their—”

“Aarrrrghhh,” Terezi says. She sits on the stairs, makes a fist, and rests her forehead against it. Then she punches her herself square between the eyes.

“—and in the end you just jumped on a ship to nowhere and sent it flaming into this ass-backwards bug marsh and what really hurts is that you won’t even—hey! Look at me. Stop punching yourself! We need that lawyer brain in case you ever decide to stop being an idiot and _come back home_ , what are you—” He moves towards Terezi, arms reaching. She gets up and kicks him in the stomach. 

“Stop being a dummy!” 

“Hi!” Rose says. Terezi and the other troll look away from each other for a moment. Before they can turn back to each other and start yelling again, she says, “I didn’t know you had…” What’s the term? “Another.” 

“He’s just a friend,” Terezi says, then turns back to the stranger. “I can’t believe I put you down as my emergency contact on the bar exam! You used to look so sexy in your training uniform. I was tricked by your pleated pants.”

The troll puffs up. “Thanks! Thanks for saying it was my reassignment to a desk due to a _genetic mutation_ that made me unsexy to you. You sure know how to stroke a troll’s ego!” 

Her fist is against her face again. “It has nothing to do with your bureaucracy gig.” 

“You just said it was the training uniform that made you unplate like a slovenly—oh my god.” He spins to Rose, opens his mouth, then shuts it. “You’re screwing the natives. Why? You can’t even breed with them!”

“I have work to do! Goodbye, Karkat. You can stay in my hiveblock. I will be back whenever.” 

“No,” Karkat says. “I’m not going away so you can ‘work’ on your new human pet. What kind of ‘work’ are you doing, anyway? She doesn’t look that bad.” 

“The human understands every word you’re saying,” Rose says. 

There’s a blank, hiccupping moment. “Oh,” Karkat says. 

“I’m a doctor,” Rose says. It sounds respectable. More respectable, at least, than her real job (translator) and his job (bureaucrat). “My work is very dangerous.” Karkat’s still eyeballing her warily. She’s a little disappointed by how nothing she says seems to work him into a fury. “Actually, I’m a necromancer.” 

“What?! Well, that’s just great.” 

“Let’s go,” Terezi says, yanking on Rose’s arm and heading downstairs. But they’re not even out the door before Karkat shouts, “You’re only staying here because you feel guilty. Hey!” He chases after them, a scowl carved onto his face. “Hey, are you listening to me? I’m not going away so easy. Human, ask Terezi about why she’s staying here—and it’s not because she gets motion sick on ships!” 

“Oh, Karkat,” Terezi says, her voice cold with savage pity. “You never know when to quit, do you.” 

That stuns him at the door. His expression quivers like a plucked string, vibrating its way into silence. 

But by then Terezi has pulled Rose through the streets, her stride quick and cane whipping around people’s ankles and calves. Her breath comes shallowly through her teeth and her eyes are red. Demonic, strained, and red.

*** 

Most of the repairs to the train station and tracks have been done by now, except for the one leading out to this suburb. They take it out to the last stop in Mishwalm then switch onto a bus. They end up standing next to each other, close enough that Rose can see the spots where Terezi’s hair swirls around the horns. The skin creeping up her horns is pale.

When they get off the bus, they stop for a while at the station so Rose can put more money on their pass. Terezi says while Rose fishes for her card, “I didn’t run away.” 

“Hmm?” Rose says, trying to sort out her bank card from her credit card from her various fake IDs. Moments like these make her feel like she’s fifteen in Rainbow Falls again trying to sneak into a tourist bar. 

“Why I’ve stayed here. You used to be so curious. Remember how you used to try to read my e-mails over my shoulder?” 

“I just assumed you were staying for the sex.” 

“Heh!” 

She finds her card, and adds the credits on both of their passes. She holds onto it for a second before giving it to Terezi. “Actually, I thought you wanted me to bring someone back for you. But the longer you stayed, the more I wondered. It’s not as though the body down there is getting any fresher.” 

Terezi takes the card. She taps it against her mouth. Then she says, “I told you about my sister.” 

“Yes. I’ve been doing a lot of research on how leprechaun and trolls have been borrowing human familial concepts and adapting it to a hive cul—”

“Rose, shut up for a moment.” They leave the station and head for the hospital, walking shoulder-to-shoulder on the sidewalk. “I told you that my sister died. Karkat came here to tell me that he’s convinced she’s alive. But I know she’s dead—I killed her myself.” Her voice lowers. She tugs on Rose’s shoulder until Rose leans in, her ear almost against Terezi’s mouth. “I have her body in deep freeze. The body’s almost as fresh as anything you’ll find here.” 

Rose pulls away. She holds her hand up, tries to articulate what she’s feeling, but all she can think of is, _I knew it!_ “Oh,” she says. “Oh, I couldn’t.” 

A sudden, injured surprise shoots across Terezi’s face. “Why not?” 

“I have a policy of not bringing back people I know.”

“What?” she says. “You told me you learned necromancy to bring back your cat. Don’t tell me you were joking.”

“It’s not like I would’ve kept him alive to be my zombie bride.”

“I would not shove myself into a matrimonial ceremony with that spiderbitch if my life depended on it. This is about justice. If she’s dead, that’s justice. I’m never wrong with justice.” 

“If you need to prove to your boyfriend that your sister is dead, then just show him the body in the freezer,” Rose says. 

Terezi turns around and narrows her eyes. “So is that a no?” 

“It’s a no.”

They’re almost at the hospital. It’s a small hospital and made from yellow bricks, made on planet. The glass, too, is a local product, and has a faintly reddish hue. Apparently no one in town finds this ominous. This is one of five places to get coffee in the suburbs, and the shop is always crowded. 

Terezi stabs the handicap button with the end of her cane with equal parts merry delight and growing anger. God. This is going to be awful. Arguments should be done in the privacy of one’s home where no one can see it, like clipping one’s nails or crying over fifty-seventh century troll holos. 

“I’m wounded by your refusal,” Terezi says. “My wounds require the salve that is your necromancy.” 

“It only works as a salve if you’re dead.”

“They’re emotional wounds. They require your _kind, considered, emotional touch_ of life. We’re friends! We have different cultural values. Such interspecies friendships require minor discomfort on both our parts: preserving my sister’s dead body in a giant freezer, and you by complying to my wishes.” Terezi kicks the door to the stairs open and holds it for her. “Think about it.” 

They head down the stairs to the hospital morgue. In the stairwell, the air grows dank and the lights flicker, switching from a sickly green to a warm yellow. She remembers, in flashes that come in time with the flickering light, Terezi and Karkat on the stairs, the way Karkat had to stand on a step to give himself a height advantage, the way they yelled at each other over, apparently, some criminal friend of Terezi’s. But dead is dead—she’s well aware of the irony in saying this, but it’s true. If her mother dies, Rose will not take the trouble to bring her back. Not unless it’s an accident, or treatable, or preventable, and can guarantee at least ten decent years of living. She doesn’t know. Why would she? 

But a secret part of her is a tyrant, and like all tyrants, a child. Given the chance, no matter the conditions or the caveats, she will do it. Though really. There must be such a thing as moving on. 

***

The body isn’t in good condition. One lung gone. Both kidneys harvested. One half of one half of one liver. Eyes extracted from the skull for the retinas. Tendons cut out from the back of the calf and thigh, skin missing from the legs and all along the back and chest. 

“What?” her contact says over the phone. “You want me to chase the organs down and put them back in for you?” 

“I thought you said she donated her body to science.” 

“I gave priority to more legitimate scientists. It’s not like she’ll be alive for long even if it works.” 

Rose says, fighting to keep her temper, “I’ve kept one alive for three weeks. You saw the videos.” 

“Sure did. Not much of a life.” 

There is a reason why Rose never discusses this aspect of her work with Jade or John anymore, or even Dave. Omelettes, eggs, crack one, get the other, that old idiom. Rose sets to work, but halfway through she sets the needles down. What is she even going to do with this? She’s not a sadist, no more than the usual person. She goes to her book, sees if there’s anything in it about restoring eyeballs. Her necromancy kit doesn’t come with any. They don’t keep well enough.

“Just bring her back as a daywalker,” Terezi says. She’s sitting on a rolling stool. She spins around, bored. “One of your ‘zumdees’ or ‘banpiers.’ Everyone knows daywalkers don’t need eyes to see you.” 

“Are you saying, ‘turn her into a vampire?’ Come on.” 

“All the bloodsuckers I know are happy with their lot.” 

“Alternian law mandates the death of all undead on sight. I doubt you’ve been chatting with very many of them.” She wishes Terezi would stop trying to talk her into bringing back her dead friend. It won’t be good for Terezi, and Rose has no intentions of becoming one of those necromancers who just spits zombies out like some kind of puppy mill. She looks at the waxy-skinned, dead woman on the table, and feels the urge to break one of her fingers. “Does my mother want me to turn people into a zombie?”

“It’s always with your mothers with you humans,” Terezi says, unimpressed. “Are you going to work today?” 

“It’s not like there’s much to work with.” She picks up the woman’s arm and lets it drop back onto the table. It makes a ‘thunk’ sound. “I can’t believe you really became my friend just to make me bring your dead girlfriend back to life. Does my mother know about your _Dawn of the Dead_ agenda, or were you hired to be my comfort wife?”

“Ugh. You could go ask her.” 

“She’s been on the _Aegis_ for weeks. How convenient.”

“No,” she says. “And no. I wasn’t hired to be anyone’s wife. And I’m insulted you think I’d befriend a necromancer just to make them bring someone back! If we hadn’t gotten along, I had plans to extort you from afar.” 

“That’s so much better,” Rose says. “I’m astounded by the generosity of your spirit. So much for interspecies friendship. What were your plans for extortion? Sleeping with me and citing some obscure Alternian law to have me arrested for miscegenation?” Terezi is standing in the way of her necromancy kit. She gives Terezi a shove. Terezi shoves back. It’s heavy and unexpectedly mean—Rose ends up with her elbows flat against the table, her breasts hovering over the body. When she tries to stand straight, Terezi keeps her down, her hard-edged hand just below her shoulder blades. Her other hand comes and tangles with Rose’s hair, yanks it until Rose’s nose is right by the side of the woman’s jaw. Rose stomps on Terezi’s foot. Terezi rears up, but stays in close. She doesn’t let go. 

“Look at that,” Terezi says. “And you would’ve brought it back anyway. At least Vriska would have one eye!” 

“Get off me,” Rose says. She tries to get her leg around one of Terezi’s and throw her off, but Terezi’s grip gets tight, and her legs outmaneuver Rose’s. The table begins to roll away from them. “Shit,” she says, realizing what this means. A second later, they’re falling. They wrestle, Rose mostly trying to grab onto Terezi and slam her to the ground, Terezi always sliding away. Soon she’s on top of Rose, legs solid around her hips, both of Rose’s arms locked straight to the side. Terezi’s expression softens. Rose is just about to go for a wild headbutt when Terezi kisses her. 

She bites and says, “Are you kidding?” 

“I thought we were having a black flip,” Terezi says, already letting go. “You brought up your mother!”

It’s genuine surprise and confusion. When Terezi’s feigning either, she gets cruel, and either smiles or sneers. Rose puts her hand against her face. 

Terezi helps Rose up. Her cane is propped against a wall. She goes to get it and says, “I’m going back home. See you when you have another corpse.” 

“Forget it,” Rose says, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Consider this partnership terminated. If you want to obsess over whoever she is, be my guest. But don’t expect me to assist you.”

“Fine,” Terezi says. “Have fun by yourself! Think of me the next time you trudge alone to your next body. Think of me the next time you choke on a fricative! Goodbye, Rose.” 

The door slams on her way out. The draft from the door disturbs the paper beneath the body. Their little tussle has disturbed the cotton stuffed into the body’s eye socket. The eyelid sags over the hole. Hideous.

***

She goes to the bar, lubricates, then goes to Terezi’s apartment again to deliver an apology. Something like, ‘You technically are useless to me, since it’s not like I _need_ you to be there, I did my revival practices perfectly well for months before you came along, but I appreciate your friendship. And I’d be happy to help you stick your friend into the ground and throw the funeral party for you, like a normal goddamned person. I’m not that drunk but I am pretty drunk, wow. I didn’t think this through. I can feel my pulse in my face.’ She was hoping the alcohol might help with the phrasing, but apparently, like the goggles, it does nothing. It is making things worse. On her sixth attempted mental revision, she ends up with the very concise, ‘Well, screw you.’ 

When she knocks, it’s not Terezi who appears, but Karkat. Karkat scowls and tries to slam the door, but Rose, dumbly, sticks her hand to stop him. He stops the door before he can slam it on her and says, “Watch it!” Then: “Are you inebriated?”

“No,” she says. 

He scowls, and opens the door. “Well, come in, monkey face, before you hurt yourself. Why don’t you have a moirail to take care of you?” 

“You’re such a prig,” Rose says. “Can’t a girl be single and unattached these days without being questioned by her mother and complete strangers?” 

“What’s a mother?” 

“Never mind.” 

Terezi’s apartment always smells of chalk. There are half-hearted murals on the walls, and many nooses dangling from the exposed pipes. Terezi thinks they’re a joke and sometimes suggests Rose open herself up to breathplay via hanging. Fewer nooses than usual this time. Karkat has taken some and laid them across the back of the apartment’s lone couch. 

“Where I’m from, you’d be dead now if you didn’t have _someone_ ,” Karkat says. “Look at me. If my moirail weren’t a clown, they would’ve culled me ages ago.”

“A clown?” 

“A juggalo. Why are you smirking, deviant?”

“Minor mix-up in translation,” she says. She sits on the couch. The noose ropes press hard against her back and shoulders. There are split-open grubs on the coffee table, some of them still waving their tiny legs about. “I see you’ve been helping yourself to the fridge.”

“She’s left me here all day,” he huffs. “Everything here is inedible. This planet is a dusty backwater boondock. I don’t understand how any self-respecting troll could tolerate staying here for so long.” Karkat glowers at her. His anger looks more akin to concern, though more strained around the eyes. She can see the part in his hair, the place where his hair might, in theory, lay flat, were he to apply an entire can’s worth of gel. Despite his broadness, his scowls, the way he never speaks but shouts in varying degrees of hoarseness, a stubborn grace clings onto the very edges of his body. His broad hands taper to nimble, elegant fingers; his jutting chin and strong brow are offset by the pleasing corner of his lips; even his red eyes, nearly the same color as her brother’s, are softened by the lines of his eyelashes, curling like the tail of a pleased cat. “Why are you staring at me like that? Are you a fetishist? Stop looking at me.” 

She gives him a moment to blush and look away bashfully before saying, “You’re cute.” 

“Fuck you,” he says, and storms out of the room. The bathroom door slams shut a second later. Rose wraps the length of the noose around her hand, tightening it until her fingers turn purple at the nail. She should go home. She really should go home. She picks up her phone and calls Terezi, but goes straight to voicemail. 

“Please leave a message after the beep,” the automated VM says. Rose puts the camera next to a still-living grub and gives the grub a good poke. ‘Sfffrggiiiiiii!’ it squeaks. She hangs up. 

A second later, her phone rings. For a second she’s convinced it’s Dave, lonely and upset about spending another night alone. Then she thinks, of course, Terezi! But the number is unknown to her. It’s a landline, she recognizes that, from somewhere downtown. An official number. God knows what it is. 

“It’s me,” Terezi says briskly when she picks up. “I’m in jail! You need to pick me up.”

“You’re in—what?” 

“I’m in jail. They arrested me on trumped up charges. And I have a bail of two hundred thousand human credits.”

“I don’t have two hundred thousand human credits. Do you have an interpreter?” 

“He is in the hospital, valiantly injured in—”

“How do these things keep happening to you?” Rose says, in lieu of hearing the rest of the story. Undoubtedly it’s about how Terezi rendered some poor guy who was just trying to do his job unconscious. “Never mind. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to make bail. Can’t you talk them into letting you go?” 

“That’s why I need you,” Terezi says. 

There’s an awkward pause. It’s the same whenever they talk with Dave in real life. There are things Rose elides in her translations when the three of them are together: the bite in her blasé delivery, some of the cruel, trollish pragmatisms that make Rose’s neck stiffen. Even that specifically aristocratic tone she sometimes has, the one she only busts out when she’s doing something grisly, like kick an old woman in the ribs or shove a nurse into a wall as they escape hospital security; it’s the voice she uses when she does not want explicit forgiveness, but implicit allowance. 

She thinks Dave picks up on it, anyway. Apparently the two of them chat regularly online. But half the things Terezi does, the way she talks to people, the way she gestures, the way she eats, only make sense if you’re a troll—no, they’re strange, even if you are a troll. Rose imagines that as a legislacerator, she hollowed out the meat of her life, putting away one thing after another thing to turn herself into a ‘murder lawyer;’ then, after leaving that life, she blinked and saw the shiny, worn shell of what she used to do, and couldn’t make sense of it. 

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. —King George the Third, just before the Americans planted a C-4 on the underside of his yacht. 

What separates the child’s mind from the adult’s mind, beyond time? There’s more continuity between the child and the adult than anyone wants, and the difference at times seems only to be the yearning to go back to before, and knowing there will be no time to do so. But other times the difference is as solid as a mountain and just as cruelly imposing. I have gone, I have seen, and I am no longer the same; the old me is a dead thing I have put away inside me. But that dead thing always finds ways to come roaring out of its coffin, as easily as a chick breaking its shell. 

It’s a strange thing to realize, that someone else depends on you even if it’s something as little as happiness or translation. She should start charging. Wait! No. Then it’d be prostitution. Or therapy, which under troll laws is still prostitution. 

“Are you still there? The uniformed man keeps trying to hang me up.” Terezi taps the speaker. “Are you thinking? Ugh, Rose, stop thinking. These might be the last words I say to a living creature. I know how ‘jails’ work.”

“I’m here,” Rose says. “Terezi, I want to say—” but then it disconnects.

*** 

At the jail, Terezi is sheepish but not very regretful. Rose can see her from the front desk. Terezi waves at her through the bars. Out here in the boonies, they consider membrane jails and force fields to be fancy technology from the future. It’s all very medieval. 

Karkat has come with Rose. He stays close to her, never more than a few inches from her elbow. When he sees humans, he scowls. When he sees trolls, his ears go flat against his head and he hisses angrily. At the police station, it takes effort to convince him to not keep butting into her conversation with the officer who’s arrested Terezi. There’s one count of disorderly conduct, one count of assaulting a police officer, and one count of unsanitary handling of a dead body.

“Is that really a thing?” Rose says. 

“Are you from here?” the officer says. “Dead things brings bugs. Bugs brings spiders. Spiders bring giant poisonous death worm infestations in the walls. Come on, woman.” 

He’s tall, dark-skinned and dark-eyed, around her age. He’s a stick in a uniform, his shirt puffy at the shoulders and pinched by a flashy red belt at the waist, his pants hanging straight down his legs. She recognizes his voice. Sounds like John, she thinks, but that’s not it. She feels like she’s heard it somewhere. Through the wall, through a door. 

“Where is the body?” she says.

“Basement. ME’s office is going to come and pick it up soon.” 

“I’d like to say that my troll friend over there has troll diplomatic immunity. She’s a member of the troll justice system. According to their laws, any attempts to arrest them will result in the immediate vaporization of all offending parties.”

“That can’t be true,” says the officer. “We swiped her card. None of us could read it. If she really was a secret agent, we’d be able to read it so no one would suspect. And she’d have a prepared alibi. _And_ we’d all think she was a man because of her disguise, right.”

“I said she was a lawyer, not a—never mind.” No one following the normal rules of logic would ever come to those kinds of conclusions. Typical Persica logic. “Karkat, give me your ID card.” 

He gives it to her. She gives it to the officer, lets him swipe the card. A moment later, he hands it back to her and says, “I can get her out on ten percent bail.”

“Great,” Rose says. “Thank you very much.” 

Karkat snatches his card from her, muttering, “Degrading cranky monkey shits getting their grubby fingers—” 

“But I can’t get you the body. Corpses are practically controlled substances ‘round here. What, you want to take it home with you? That’s sick.” 

She looks over at Terezi over in the jail. She’s staring at Rose. Her glasses are folded. They hang from the collar of her shirt, swinging at an uneven beat. 

“Ah,” she says. “You’re looking for a bribe.” 

He leans across the counter. He licks his lips. “You’re Strider’s sister, right? Tell him to call me back.” 

“What?” she says, then remember with brain-burning clarity: last week, she woke up at three in the morning to someone telling her brother, ‘Oh, yeah, sexy baby, come all over my face.’ And also, ‘Yeah, ride me like I’m Optimus Prime and you’re Starscream.’ And then, ‘Okay dude those aren’t things, what the hell. What the hell. I told you we’re Ninja Turtles, dude, get with, get with, shit, officer, beat me harder, fill me all the way up, oh yeah, fill my gas tank with your stuff. Holy motherfucking shit.’ The next morning she made sure to repeat those words back at him; the morning after that, she poured milk out for her breakfast, and found that he squirted blue food coloring into the carton. Revenge, she guesses. No! She doesn't want to think about it anymore. She smiles at the officer and says, “Sure thing.” 

***

Technically she doesn’t have to see the body at all right now. Later on she’ll go to the morgue, chat with the morgue owner into letting her in, and inspect the body. But, well, why wait when she can do it now? She yearns to know what it is Terezi has been hiding. The face of this mysterious sister. The anticipation is killing her. 

“I’ll be back as soon as I see it,” Rose says. 

“Okay,” Terezi says. She has her glasses on backwards, and has to scrunch up her face to keep it from falling off her nose. She wraps her fingers around the bars. “So you’re going to do it? Bring her back?” 

“I only want to see,” Rose says. 

“Yeah,” Karkat says. “I’m coming with you,” he says to Rose. 

“That’s just because you want to say ‘I told you so,’” Terezi mutters. 

“Yeah, that’s right. I came all the way here to tell you that. And because shit-wise if I’m going to let smug and smirky leave me out in the open with all these humans. Everyone knows they’re dangerous. You’re safer in there than I am out here.” 

“Really?” Rose says. 

“Yeah! Yeah, they tell us all about you hair-faces in the army. If you shoot a human, you have to take off their head. None of that lame ‘cut them in half’ shit. Because you’re runners, right. You think you’ll be able to get away, but if you just saw ‘em down, they’ll superheal and chase you down with their tree hands and snap your neck. And they’re sex stalkers! They fuck everything that moves and then once they decide, that one over there, that’s the bulge that makes my glands wet, they spray their sex partner with acid and, I’ve had enough of this planet—” 

“Take a breath,” Rose says. The officer is waiting discreetly for Karkat to stop ranting. Terezi is sitting on the bench, rolling her eyes. “Deep breath. In and out.”

“Fuck you. I don’t need anyone telling me how to breathe. Especially someone who walks around with their lungs full of hemoglobin. How do you even live on land? Oh god!” He puts his mouth between his hands, squishes it together, and wheezes a few times, then straightens up. “Okay, I’m good. Let’s go get the booty. I mean the body. Fuck this.”

The body is down in the basement. Karkat keeps close to her elbow the whole time. “My low light vision’s not so great,” he says when Rose casts a weird look at him. “Okay? I failed the vision test. The only reason the drones haven’t come to saw my bulge out of its plate with their giant laser knives is because other trolls can use me as a hump—” 

“What’s he saying?” the officer says, turning back. 

“Prayers,” Rose says. Karkat has perfect enunciation, like he’s an actor permanently doing voice exercises. When he speaks, he ends up pulling his lips back all the way to the gum. Rose pats Karkat on the head. He vibrates for a moment, then looks at the officer and hisses. Then he grins and laughs. 

“I hate humans,” Karkat says through grit teeth. “Hahaha! Shit. Get me out of here.” 

The basement is like many of the other basements she’s seen before. Cold lights, creepy damp air, air conditioning running loud in the background. The body’s being kept in a long box packed with ice. The officer stands behind them, whistling and combing his hair back as they clear away the icepacks. 

“I knew it!” Karkat says, frowning at a quadrant of clothed chest. He yanks back the lapel of the blue coat the corpse is wearing, and pulls the collar of the bloody black shirt until he reveals a clean, gray shoulder. “I knew it. This isn’t Vriska. Look at this arm!” He digs for the arm and waves it back and forth, like a smartass kid waiting for someone to call on him. “Vriska’s left arm got cut off ages ago. Got one of that sweaty jerk’s robot arms to replace it. And those hands! Vriska always painted her nails, that vain dumbass.” He stares at the hand for a moment longer, then tears into the ice packs covering the face. “What the hell?” 

“What?” Rose says, peering into the box. It’s a male, though it’s hard to tell. His horns have been sawed off and project sideways out of his head. There’s something weird about the way the icebags sag across the torso, like the guy’s torso has melted. She tosses the icebags away, opens up the coat, rolls up the shirt, and stares. His torso’s been duct taped together. 

“What the hell,” Karkat says. “Poor bastard.” He sniffles and wipes his nose. He strokes the troll’s cheek with the back of his hand. Then he looks up at the police officer. “We need to kill that guy.”


	4. Squid Fuckers Seven

Immediately, he can tell the human disapproves. 

“Why should we kill him?” she says. 

“So we can bring Terezi the body,” Karkat says. Maybe it isn’t obvious. He has no idea how much Rose knows or doesn’t know about Vriska, but it’s clear as fresh blood plasma that she doesn’t get the significance of this. Poor Tavros! He sticks his hand into the box and feels for that giant cut. It’s a clean one, bisecting him in half. There are a few gashes along his side, like whoever did it had to work up the nerve to whack him—or, he thinks, like they wanted to make sure he could feel it. 

“The morgue will be open tomorrow morning,” Rose says. Her Alternian is creepily close to perfect, but sounds too meaty for Karkat’s taste with all that wet stuff in her throat flapping around. And those teeth! Why do they all have different shapes and sizes? “Isn’t it good enough for her to know that it isn’t this Vriska person, anyway?” 

“If you won’t help me kill the human, then use your necromancy and we’ll lug half of him up to Terezi to talk.” 

“He’s been cut in half. It wouldn’t be right,” she says, frowning like she’s not already the kind of person who drags people kicking and screaming from their peaceful deaths and back into the burning sunlight of the living for the chuckles. “I thought you’d know why no experienced necromancer would do that. Don’t you have a necromancy division in your army?” 

“Sure,” he says. “Sure, I'd know why if they had assigned me to a necrosupport unit, or spent my whole childhood playing ultra-violent occult games for girls! I was a suburb kid. All of my hobbies were wholesome. Teleholo romances. Neighbor wrangling. Meme stalk-and-stab. Stuff like that.” 

There’s a blank look on Rose’s face, like she’s trying to parse something in his sentence. For a moment he’s scared she might ask him to explain something and make him look stupid; but instead she asks, “Was he someone important to her?” 

“I guess. They were old FLARPING buddies.” He’s not sure how to phrase it. Tavros, if he was still alive, would have been an uncommon thing, a friend without enmity, or at least much of it. There’s a saying in troll culture, that friendship’s what you do when you’re still on-planet, friend-enemies are what you make when you’re in the military, and from then on it’s nothing but a glorious field of enemies for the rest of your life. Tavros and Terezi might not have been close, but they were friends. That means something to home trolls that other species or even colony trolls don’t get. 

“He was Vriska’s boyfriend,” he says. “The non-shitty one. The one who wasn’t a nauseating casteist dickweed who rightly deserved the bisection Kanaya gave him.”

“Who’s Kanaya?” 

“You’re off-topic,” he snaps. “It’s important! Terezi will want to investigate the body. And then…” And then she’ll probably go berserk and leave the planet to find Vriska and kill her all over again. He feels something in him quiver. She’s already blind. If she keeps going this way, he might as well cut her arms off for her or slit her throat. When he showed up at her apartment, he only wanted her to stop wasting her life on this good-for-nothing colony moping about killing an unhinged, still alive asswipe, not to send her flying off on a rage masturbation session. 

He looks up at the human police officer, the one who’s staring at them both like they’re both off their rockers. There’s been enough collateral damage already without him adding to the fire. 

“Fine,” he says. “That human can live.”

“Thank you for your magnanimity,” Rose says. “Truly there is nothing more noble than a troll deciding to let an innocent human live.”

He ignores her. He reaches down into the box to try to close his eyes and maybe change his expression into something more appropriate for a dead dude. That guy drew the shitstick in every draw. The only good thing the universe ever gave him was a great rack—and now even that’s gone. 

*** 

There’s going to be something called an ‘arraignment’ in the morning, Rose tells Terezi once Terezi’s out of the jail. “You might want a lawyer,” she says. 

“I’m already a lawyer,” Terezi says, displeased. She thinks. “I’ll tell them I was planning on eating the body for dinner.”

“That’s exactly the kind of innovative thinking that powers this economy. We should become venture capitalists and shoot heroin on a bed of burning hundred dollar bills.”

Once Rose goes back to her hive, he and Terezi get takeout dinner in the troll neighborhood. It’s a miserable bunch of trolls who come to these human colonies: army flunkies, trolls who _like_ living in humans, trolls who want to try, for some reason, going into economics and business ownership, like they’re sick of chopping people up for a living or something. 

He hates all of them on instinct. Something about the way they look, like they might try to shake his hand at a moment’s notice. He’s heard stories about trolls who forget how to be trolls. It starts with diddling a leprechaun, and it ends with trolls becoming pacifists and wearing shirts with double rainbows. Galactic peace, they say. Sure! Galactic peace his ass. 

They go back to her apartment and eat on her couch. Half-grilled snakes, spicy scorpions, raw eggs from some local bug, cheap grubs, degutted, on top of something Terezi says is bread, but too sweet to be real bread. It’s, Terezi tells him, _Wonder_ bread. 

When he snorts and rolls his eyes, she says, “Remember that time you hid in my hiveblock? Illegally, too! You were technically a deserter.” 

“We were on orders to surrender! Don’t spout weirdass conspiracy theories…” He trails off, trying to remember which moment she’s talking about. They were eight and a half sweeps old, a sweep and a half into their compulsory war duty, and serving on the same front on the colony of Squid Fuckers Seven. She definitely isn’t talking about the moment when he arrived at her apartment, hyperventilating and unable to sit still without vomiting or buzzing like a cicada. He was like that all through the night and early dawn; he knows they talked about something, but fuck him if he knew. 

He tries to focus, but his thoughts are drawn to daybreak, when she decided to make him shut up. She told him to get in her recuperacoon, but there was no way, no way, he was going to sleep in there if they were both naked, never mind that they had been involved for almost two perigees at that point. His gums were raw and his tongue sandy, and his whole body felt like it stuck to itself. She shoved him into the shower anyway, and made him wear one of her spare uniforms afterwards. And—he doesn’t know, she found something about that sexy. She gave him the best blowjob of his life, his whole bulge down her throat and three fingers knuckles-deep in his nook. Then he was flat out on the mating platform, licking her nook, screwing his tongue around her bulge; eventually she turned him over and fucked him until he cried. She came in his ass, damn her, like she _wanted_ him to shit blue. 

He smiles at her, tentatively. She pushes him over. 

“Ow! What was that for?” 

She throws a scorpion at him. He catches it between his teeth and swallows it whole. 

“Who did the body belong to?” she says, while the scorpion’s still skittering down his throat. “You went in all ‘I told you so’ and came back smelling like you needed to throw up. Was it someone you knew?” 

“Uh,” he says.

“Don’t try lying to me. I can smell your deceit. Was it someone from your training unit? She probably targeted you!”

“No! Stop taking blind stabs at the whack-a-mole booth. And stop talking about smelling things.” 

“Was it one of your friends? A hate boyfriend? Your auspistice? What, has Kanaya gotten tired of directing your hate beams away from your own booty?” When he says nothing, she says, her easygoing tone worn thin, “I’m going to find out anyway, Karkat. You don’t want that guy to be a meaningless drop in the ocean of Vriska’s victims.” 

“Give me a break! You aren’t a legislacerator anymore,” he says. “Forget her already. The best revenge is, I don’t know. Stuffing your face with sweetgrubs and going, ‘hahaha’ while having an orgy in a pool of champagne.” 

“Ugh, how are you going to drink the champagne once everyone’s pailed in it? What a waste.” 

“That’s the point, wiseass. You know what they say about justice. Justice is the auspistice of the law and criminals.”

“That’s trashy rhetoric spoken by propaganda officials in the training videos!” She shakes her head. “Your naivety is cute, but useless to me.” 

“Yeah, as though,” he says, just as she says, “And if you—” They both go on for a few sentences before stopping. He has no idea what she said. To be fair, he’s not sure what he said, either. 

“You first,” she says. 

“Okay. Okay. I’m trying to be nice, you obsessive, certifiable piece of work. I didn’t come all the way to this gassy shithole just to help you on your mission of ‘I am the day, I am troll Echobeastman, I lurk in the dark corners of the fucking chambers to punish people who try to escape from their bucket duty for the good of the Empire.’” She watches him without passion or obvious commentary. He steels his spine and says, “If that’s all you wanted, then I don’t know why I’m here.” 

“I don’t know why you’re here, either,” she says. “You never should have told me she was still alive to begin with! I could have been happy here if you hadn’t gotten lonely and desperate for someone to pay attention to you. What was it? You couldn’t get by another day without someone to pat your hand? One day we will all be dead or gone or sick of you, and you’ll be alone—and then what?” 

“No, no, no,” he says, shaking his head to clear her words, but she’s pulling him closer into the red void of her gaze. He snatches his arm away and shoves her. He’s short, but has the benefit of mass; not enough to knock her down, but enough for him to break free. He scrambles off the couch, rubbing his arm. “What the fuck! What the fuck was that for? Some friend you’re turning out to be!” he says. He kicks the table and storms off, determined to fuck straight off and leave the planet; only he heads off in the wrong direction, and instead of finding the door, he ends up going down her lightless hallway. She hasn’t bothered putting light bulbs in the hallway. It’s not like she needs them—no more than she needs or wants him. 

He trips over the edge of a rug and bends his wrist against a wall. The dark funnels him to a bathroom, and in his scramble to find the light switch, he hits the door shut. It locks behind him, like the shittiest joke in history. 

“Come on, come on!” He knocks over a cup, toothpaste, toothbrush, but no fucking light. His stomach rolls up, and he manages to get his elbows against the sink before hurling up bits of scorpion and grubs. He turns on the faucet to rinse out the upchuck and searches again for the light switch, moving his hand in careful, straight lines. He’s about to start panicking again when he finds it. His reflection is the first thing he sees, pasty and puffy everywhere. 

He hears Terezi coming down the hall. She stops in front of the door, not touching it or trying the knob. 

“What?” he croaks. 

“I’m sorry. Stop sniveling.” 

“I’m not crying. Fuck you.”

“I only told you to stop sniveling. I never said you were crying. Open the door.” 

He jiggles the knob. Nothing. He tries it again, slamming his shoulder against the wood, but it remains stuck. 

She apparently interprets this as him telling her to go, because she switches into her pet-the-Karkat voice. “You’re right. I’m being dumb about this. I should return my ticket for the I Stab You, You Stab Me, Mutual Bleed Off Festival!” He can feel her weight coming to rest on the door, a faint heat like a heavy shadow. He wonders if she can smell him from here. Ever since she lost her vision, she keeps talking about that. Smells and colors, as though the two of them are the same. 

“So why don’t you?” he says. 

“If I had left Vriska like I meant to when we were still on Alternia, maybe then I could have done what you said. Go off for a brilliant career of making miscreants bow before the feet of justice and mixing their blood with the wine and swilling it all down. She used to always give me room to punish her for her misdeeds in our games. I could’ve let her go, if she hadn’t killed Aradia and then mind controlled the jury into letting her go. Aradia, of all trolls! Neither of us know why she did it. If she were really our friend, she would have at least stayed in jail for a sweep before—”

“Hold it!” he says. “What do you mean ‘neither of us?’ Who’s the ‘us?’”

“Aradia, of course. We had a talk while the ship was crashing. It’s complicated. The point is—” 

“We are not glossing over how your ass is haunted by a pissed off ghost stuck in troll limbo!” he says. “Are you possessed? She’s possessing you, isn’t she! Stop listening to Aradia’s _whee whoo_ s and get a freaking exorcism until—” 

“My mind is perfectly clear! Even if Aradia never came to me, I would have wanted to make Vriska pay. For the longest time I thought I only wanted to take her back to the Courts and make her confess everything, from the time she was a grub all the way to the present day—but there was never any other choice.” 

They go quiet. He thinks he can feel her breathing through the door. The silence reminds him of the leaves he once saw out a window, the ones he saw after the army drones came to collect him on his seventh wiggling day. The drones put him and his lusus up in separate convoys, his lusus to be deposited near a breeding cavern to take up some new grub, Karkat shipped to a waiting room for the next shuttle to the orbital training station. There were hundreds of trolls in the waiting area, and barely enough room to lay down. He wound up dozing in half-hour fits against the window. The only reason he wasn’t blinded or grilled into steak was because of the giant, black-bark trees planted by the windows. The leaves pressed against the glass like dozens of giant, purple hands, shielding him from the light. Those leaves grow more vivid in his mind’s eye every year, more beautiful, more impossibly ethereal. 

He tries the door again. This time it unlocks. Terezi removes her weight from it in increments until the door swings open. Terezi leans thoughtlessly against a wall, her face drawn in on itself. This is the proof of their friendship, he thinks, that she’ll let her face go soft around him. He wipes his mouth against the back of his hand, unsure of what to say. 

“I asked her to repent,” she says. “As the ship was going down.” 

“Ha!” he says, then pats her shoulder a little awkwardly. “What did she say?” 

She lifts her hand palm up, her mouth opening and staying open for a while in thought. Her hand curls against her mouth. “I killed her for it. I thought I killed her for it.”

She lets her hand drop to her hip, tilts her head back so her horns brush against the wall. Then she relaxes in a single great breath. 

Sometimes their friendship is like rock climbing by himself in the late hours of the morning, being angry at the rock wall for existing, angry at himself for trying, but wanting, more than anything, to finish, even as his whole body burns. “Come home with me,” he says. “We can pretend you had a mental breakdown from work-related stress. They’re always sympathetic to that.” 

“Help me kill her instead. I’m sick of her, I’m sick of her being alive—” A gleaming, calculation appears in her eyes. “Help me get rid of her for everyone she’s ever killed! They were your friends, too.” She takes his arm, the one she gripped before, and rubs her palms in circles against the sore, finger-shaped marks. It’s not the coolness of her hands he feels, but the unyielding weight of her hopes, the pain of her determination. 

*** 

They work through the rest of the night and into the morning. According to Karkat, Terezi’s status in the Alternian system is ‘ambiguously dead, possibly civilly disobedient,’ and accordingly, the government had frozen her accounts, repossessed her apartment, and flagged her ID card for immediate arrest and possible torture. Karkat spends hours on the phone yelling at people while Terezi calls some friends and asks them for favors: find some heads and put them in her boss’ recuperacoon; hack off the arm of some criminal or another and leave it on the boss’ desk; kill the boss’ moirail! Nepeta draws the line there, telling her to retract those claws and cool those paws! Two out of three is enough to put the fear of Terezi Pyrope in her boss.

“Fine, fine,” Terezi says, impatient. The hot weather, made worse by the return of the sun, is making her irritable. Everything itches. She’s getting contact rash from where the couch meets the edge of her boxers. “Give me a call when you’ve finished it.” Karkat watches her, suspicious. “What?” 

“You two sounded chummy.”

“I bet we do.” She misses the days when Nepeta had more time for cybering. 

“Do you think,” he says, but turns his attention back to the phone before he can finish. “What’s that, you slackshit waste? No, don’t even say it! You got scared of that ladder-climbing bureaucratic bulgeweed and cluckbeasted yourself out of even talking to her! You’re going to march backwards right now, _right now_ , into that office and talk to her, or give her the galaxy’s sloppiest and most unerotic blowjob, I don’t care! I don’t care as long as she signs the little box that says ‘supervisor signature.’ Call me back when you have a solution to my problem, shit nugget!” He hangs up then says, “Do you think she’ll ever forgive Gamzee?” 

Gamzee beat Equius within an inch of his life. Not dead, but never the same afterwards, either. She sniffs at a troll online phonebook. “Karkat, leave conflict resolution to the professionals.” 

Someone knocks on the door. Karkat freezes. Terezi turns her head and inhales. It’s sunshine, layered thinly with alcohol and bug spray. “It’s Rose.” 

“Why is she here?” Karkat demands. There’s another call on Karkat’s line. From the way he’s vibrating, it’s from someone important. “ _Make her go away_ ,” Karkat says. “Whrrrrrrrrr _rrrrrrrrr_.” He clenches his teeth together to stop the buzzing, but then he opens his mouth again. “She’s _distracting_.” She thumps him manfully on the back again until he kicks a fuss and forces her to get the door before his  CONCENTRATION IS SHOT FOREVER and WE’RE STRANDED HERE FOR LIFE BECAUSE YOUR HUMAN PET GETS US HUMAN ARRESTED AGAIN, wrrrrr.

Rose is at the door, wearing all white. She has, Terezi notices, recently ‘touched up’ her roots. Her hair smells brighter than usual, and her scalp smells unusually raw. “There you are,” Rose says. “You’re not planning on going to your arraignment in boxers, are you?” 

“If it’s not the trial, I don’t plan on being there. On Alternia, we just tried the criminals without making them declare their obvious guilt. We have a much better opinion of wrongdoers.” 

“It’ll be fun! You can point out all the flaws in our human legal code.” Rose snaps the boxer’s elastic waistband. “Now hurry up and get dressed.” 

“I’m leaving the planet,” Terezi says. “I don’t need no stinking arraignment.”

Much to her annoyance, Rose doesn’t even blink. She doesn’t even smell betrayed or injured. She crosses her arms, shifts her weight from one leg to another, recrosses her arms, puts a hand on her hip, rubs her chin in a way she once claimed made her wizardly instead of a grade A weirdo. The smell on her is butterscotch-sweet and prematurely nostalgic. Like flowers, Terezi thinks, only to get irritated when thought sets off a sudden burst of jasmine on top of the butterscotch. “It’s too bad this marks the end of our journey together. There’s something undignified about the ending.” 

“You make it sound like someone’s dying,” she complains. Rose leans towards her, in a ‘kiss me’ way. Terezi grins. “You look like your mother in this light.”

Rose scowls. “I’m thinking about my mother in the nude, right now. I’m thinking about you sticking it up her ass while shoving a dildo up her twat. Oh, god!” She squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them. “Are you going to kiss me goodbye or not?” 

Terezi’s not going to turn a free kiss down. It’s slow and both distracted, and not very good; it ends when Rose puts a hand on Terezi’s shoulder. 

“What do you want me to do with your old FLARPing partner?” she says. “Are you planning on taking the body with you?” 

Terezi feels her blood go cold, a sudden numbness in her fingers and a chill that spears her through the chest. “My old what?” 

“Hasn’t Karkat told you yet?” Rose says. “He said something about your friend. Do you not know him?”

“He’s told me,” Terezi says, trying to recover before Rose can say more things. She flexes her fingers. She wants to go back inside and shake Karkat until information comes flying out his memory bank; but first she must take care of Rose. Terezi Pyrope is not a discourteous troll. Not, at least, to her friends. The Lalondes have been good to her, even if they’re creepy and probably two sneezes away from going the full-blown evil scientist. She wishes she didn’t have to go. How nice would it be to stay in a place where the weight of your sins and duties are meaningless to those around you! In that kind of environment, no one minds relieving you of your burdens. That’s the kind of magic only a stranger has. 

Rose clears her throat, and just like that, the moment for a really great speech has passed. Terezi straightens herself out, takes a breath, and says, a little lamely, “Goodbye, Rose.” 

“Yes,” she says. “Goodbye.” And then she turns and goes, without any melodrama or second glances. She probably choreographed it. Just like, she’s sure, Karkat is doing his best to hide Tavros from her. Oh, his intentions were good, no doubt! Doubtlessly. 

She snuffs out the tiny anger before it can catch on anything with a click of her jaws, and goes back inside. Karkat has finished his important phone call. He’s now eating stringy fungus imported from the home world. When she glowers, he holds out the empty package apologetically. She snatches the last strings dangling from between her teeth and chews on them while she thinks. He scooches over on the couch to make room for her, but she stays in front of him, on her feet. 

“What are you going to do with the body?” she says. 

He doesn’t look away from his husktop, just pokes at the keyboard a few times. “Dunno. Send it back to one of his quadrantmates so they can have one last sorry jerkoff before they send it to the food processor, I guess.”

“Let me take care of it. Who’s his matesprit?” 

“I got it. Fuck off.” She can smell him warming, hear the beginning clicks of a drone in his thorax. “Just work on softening the courts. I have the paper pushing side down.”

“Did he have a kismesis? A moirail? Or was he the most inept clove of an auspisticism ever! Poor Tavros. Not even Karkat can bother to remember who he is.” 

Karkat’s no longer clicking. He’s glaring now, the heat steaming off his shoulders and neck and wrist, the rest of it trapped in his giant sweater. “Oh, great! You knew who he was all this time. So you were, what, just pecking away at my ego like a giant eagle chewing on troll Prometheus’ liver? Fucking with my internal organs, wow! What a thrill.”

“Shut up. I didn’t figure it out until just now. Don’t pin arbitrary motives to me like they’re achievement badges on a troll Girl Scout’s vest.” He calms down, shrinking down like a calmed cat. She puts a hand on his head and does her best to ruffle his hair without bumping into his horns. She could strangle the life out of him! Again she snaps her jaw shut, snuffs the anger out. “It’s okay, Karkat. I’m not mad.” 

“Really?” he says, instantly suspicious. 

“Yes, sure.” 

He doesn’t say anything at first. He holds himself still, like he’s desperate to not let anything show and sincerely believes she can’t tell when he’s trying to hide something from her. “What did you mean when you asked me if I remembered that night on Squid Fuckers Seven? What was even the point?” His whole body’s guarded against her, elbows tucked close to his chest and shoulders hunched in, even as he looks at her like hope can bring them back to that moment when he fell through her door. She was convinced then he could become something more than what he was; but ever since then he’s been like a tucked in turtle, going nowhere. 

“I didn’t mean anything,” she says. “I was just jogging your memory.”

He tugs at the neck of his sweater. “I still love you,” he says, his tone borderline hostile. 

This isn’t new to her. She’s not dumb. Not in knowing Karkat, at least. What to do with him! That’s the hard part. “Cool,” she says. 

“Not cool!” he says. The hope in his eyes has gone wild and glassy, and more than a little pathetic. “Look—I don’t know. Forget I said anything. I’m being stupid. I could hang myself with a million nooses with the hang ups I got! Strip my skin off and call me Mr. Cherryfucked. I’ll have them ship me back to the _Glam Clam_ in a coffin, for all the good it’ll do me.” 

“Sssh,” she says. “Shut up. Stop it. Listening to you hurts my ears.” She puts her hand on the top of his head again, the heel of her palm against his hairline, her fingers gripped around the crown, and pushes down until his forehead rests against her shoulder, until the smell of salt vanishes into the fabric of her shirt.


End file.
